Hey all! Earlier this year, I launched a parody ICO called PonziCoin (http://ponzicoin.co), and I found that it was fairly difficult to easily accept Ethereum on a site and support all the major wallets (hardware, web, mobile) so I decided to make Etherglade. It's a drop-in UI that you should be able to add to your site in less than 5 minutes and start accepting Ethereum - it even supports smart contracts! In the future, I also hope to add features to make interacting with Ethereum and smart contracts easier for the average person.
I would love any feedback, comments, or questions :)
Side Note: Don't start a pyramid scheme, even if you explicitly state that it is a pyramid scheme and it's clearly a parody. It turns out a significant amount of people will still put a significant amount of money in
There are people who "play" ponzis for a living. They use whatever information they can find to determine if they believe they can get in and out before the ponzi reaches the start of its collapse. Then they hop in, make some money, and hop out.
I think it's contributing to the decline of civilization, but you have to admire how a business investing approach can be applied to virtually anything.
Except that I doubt anyone approaches a poker table not knowing they are entering a competition.
Ponzis prey on greedy, foolish people - some of whom actually believe the lies being promoted about it being a real investment. It's even worse in the cryptocurrency world, where fools are convinced that they are buying shares in mining operations or super-secret trading bots.
There are plenty of legitimate scams in the cryptocurrency world, but the games we're referring to (PonziCoin, PoWH3D, CryptoCelebrities, CryptoKitties, etc.) are very transparent about the fact that they are zero-sum games where you have the chance to lose a lot of money.
These games should really be considered simulated bubbles instead of Ponzis. A Ponzi scheme collapses when the operator walks away with everyone's money. PoWH3D doesn't have an operator since it's totally decentralized. It will collapse when everyone decides to sell. Likewise, CryptoCelebrities will never crash but inevitably somebody will get stuck with a collectible that nobody else wants to buy. It's akin to buying a beanie baby or a tulip for an exorbitant price, only to find that there's nobody to resell it to.
Can you talk more about your plans for smart contract support? Will this mean I can paste my ABI in and it will auto generate a UI for it? This could be amazing if so.
Yes, that's exactly how it works! Once you paste in the ABI, you can pass in a function name and any parameters to Etherglade and the UI will reflect that :)
I should also point out that Etherglade can also be "attached" to a button on your website and then when the button is clicked, the UI will show up in a modal!
This is a nice implementation. Using credit cards online is actually a little annoying/hacky, despite years of UX work and several billion dollar companies built to solve this problem. If Ethereum or another blockchain tech can solve this at a lower cost than the current payment processors (2-3% fees), then we might actually see widespread adoption online.
There's not precise comparison, but with Ethereum you could have different classes of payments backed by different types of contract which the end user could choose from when purchasing. E.g.
- For small payments, or to trusted suppliers, no chargebacks
- For large one-time transactions, funds held in escrow for a given period
- For long term transactions, funds are committed but only accessed over time
etc.
Perhaps there won't be any chargebacks as we know them available in ethereum, but if you want to pay extra 1-2% as part of your payment to offset the risk (which is basically what you're doing now with credit cards, but enforced), that could be an option.
If you're sending it directly to someone else, there's no concept of chargebacks. However, if you are sending it to a smart contract, the contract can implement refund functionality. Admittedly, I don't know of any smart contracts that have this functionality today but as smart contracts gain a wider audience (hopefully), people will "vote with their wallets" and support smart contracts that have some dispute resolution built in and other consumer-friendly practices
This looks nice. One thing though - you should consider using strings instead of numbers for the amounts. The problem is that numbers in JS are actually floats, and you lose precision on high values. Probably not going to make a big difference, but e.g. 100000000000000001 can't be represented as a number in JS.
It's a bit hard to do currently - there's no "pull" support for any Ethereum wallets right now, so the user has to approve every request manually and usually has to be on the site for the site to even make the request.
However, one of the concepts I'm working on to make it easier for the average person to use Ethereum is to introduce a hosted wallet option. If Etherglade hosts wallets, we could then introduce easy subscription functionality (which the user can manage). So definitely plausible down the road!
Oh interesting! Thanks for the link - will definitely be following that, I think it's a really good idea. My one fear is that some websites will try to trick users with dark patterns that their purchase is 1 time but will actually be a recurring subscription, but I'm sure if wallet confirmations make subscriptions clear that should be less of an issue.
Yep, but as the other commentator pointed out, you need to take all the ether at once. So if you wanted to charge 0.1 ETH a month for 6 months, you would need to take 0.6 ETH up front into the contract, which kind of defeats the whole point of the subscription model.
The smart contract could allow the user to withdraw the unused ETH to cancel the subscription but the fact that it still requires the entire amount upfront makes it an extremely poor user experience.
Yes you can. You could create an smart contract where you lock X amount of eth, and set up how much the other party can withdraw each month. Then is up to the provider of the service to withdraw the amount each month, which seems to me less an issue since they want to get paid.
I would love any feedback, comments, or questions :)
Side Note: Don't start a pyramid scheme, even if you explicitly state that it is a pyramid scheme and it's clearly a parody. It turns out a significant amount of people will still put a significant amount of money in